The ability to discriminate polarization states of an incoming wavefront has led to the development of various sensor designs which can be utilized to extract polarization information from an incoming signal. With advances in detection processing techniques, these sensors can also be used to provide increased accuracy in determining the direction-of-arrival of unknown signals. The development of electromagnetic vector sensors, as disclosed herein, enables new processing techniques to be utilized in real life situations.
Current direction finding devices, used in the field having mutual orthogonal axial elements, include vector sensors. There have been several multi-element sensing antennas designed and utilized in the field that provide HF radio wave direction finding capabilities. In addition, these multi-element sensing devices utilize various processing algorithms to accurately determine angle of arrival and thus require the multiple elements to be spatially orthogonal to each other, which in turn requires a high degree of isolation between the multiple loop and dipole antenna elements. However, current devices exhibit poor isolation characteristics between the multiple antenna elements (i.e., the dipole and loop elements) and inadequately resolve incoming wave vectors in elevation and azimuth directions, because of the requirement that the multiple elements be spatially and electrically orthogonal.
Therefore, the need exists for an electromagnetic vector sensor device which facilitates data collection of known transmitted high frequency skywave signals for purposes of achieving high frequency geolocation signal processing, using electromagnetic vector sensors (EMVS) direction-of-arrival estimation of unknown signals, by measuring three complete components of the electric field and three components of the magnetic field at a single point.
Furthermore, the need exists for an electromagnetic vector sensor device having a series of loops and a series of dipoles configured spatially orthogonal to each other in such a manner as to maintain a high degree of isolation between the dipole and loop elements.
Further, the need exists for the electromagnetic vector sensor device to utilize various processing algorithms to accurately determine angle of arrival and to be able to clearly resolve, to a high degree of accuracy, incoming wave vectors and polarization of incoming signals, by minimizing interactions between dipole and loop elements.